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About Us

We’re Chuck and Lori Ros, prime-of-life nomadic empty-nesters

Welcome to our website!

A few years ago, life changed dramatically for us: both of Chuck’s parents passed away, we sold our company, both our kids moved out, and Chuck shed 80 pounds! With a passion for travel, exploring, drinking wine, ballroom dancing, making new friends and having great conversation, we hit the road in June, 2014. We returned home the next March…just long enough to sell our house so we can keep traveling. We’re full-time, fully-committed, middle-aged nomads now!

We Travel to Live, But We Don’t Live for Travel

Being full-time travelers isn’t unique. You can, in fact, Google up a few hundred nomads with blogs. The majority of them seem to be, well, a lot younger than we are. We think it’s great that there seems to be a whole generation of people hitting the road to see the world right after college, or even foregoing college altogether to travel. That’s just not what we did.

Probably like you, we’ve spent the last few decades experiencing a great deal of life. We finished college, and both (eventually) went on to earn Master’s degrees. We’ve seen our two wonderful children grow into adults, go off to school, move out, and start building their own lives: one is in fact now married, and the other is engaged. We’ve built houses and we’ve built companies. Chuck learned to fly. We’ve been diving and skiing, and we’ve seen a lot of Europe one vacation at a time. Three of our four parents have passed away. We’ve developed a passion for wine and learned to brew a pretty good English ale. And lately we’ve managed to learn something we’ve put off for far too long: ballroom dancing.

While we admire the younger nomad set’s wanderlust, we think travel is a part of life, it’s not meant to be your life. We would gladly have traveled more during our life-building years, but we also wouldn’t give up any of those moments (well, a few we would give up!)

So if you’re like us--50 or 60-somethings, baby-boomers, empty-nesters, middle-agers, or whatever you like to call us “mature folk”--with a newly enabled passion for travel and a curiosity in figuring out how to travel more, take longer vacations, extend your holidays, or even become full time prime-of-life nomads, we hope you find our site informative, interesting, and most importantly, fun!

VagaBONDing

We aim to make our site useful to any wanderlust-afflicted travelers seeking ways to travel more and travel longer, but as you’ll notice, we’re a couple, married 30 years to be precise (that’s a lot of living!), so naturally our website might slant a bit to a couple’s perspective.

One of the things we've hoped to achieve with our travels, though it sounds so cliché, is to “rediscover” each other. We had, after all, been focused the last 20+ years on bringing up children, building companies, and all sorts of stuff that didn’t always support our relationship. We actually feared what would happen when, suddenly, we’re spending all of our time together.

Fears aside, we’ve figured a few things out, learned a lot about each other, and now we look at our ongoing middle-aged nomadic adventures as “vagaBONDing”, and we can’t imagine going back to a “regular”, separated life.

Careers and (that 4-letter word) Work

Before you think that we must be rich, and that’s how we can afford to travel all the time, understand that we’re firmly entrenched in the American middle class. We aren’t rich by any financial standards, and we aren’t retired: we’ve just figured out that making a living doesn’t require sitting in the same place every day. It’s true that we’ve had to make some adjustments in how we work, and we’ve had to learn a few things, but we’re enjoying life like never before without any real need to worry about “balancing” anything. Travel, work, and play are all an integral part of our lives.

In case you’re wondering what we do, Chuck is a fractional (fancy word for part time) software product manager, technology consultant, and wannabe writer. Lori, a retired teacher, is now taking the helm of our ExecuTrain virtual training franchise.

ChuckAndLori.com

So hopefully that gives you an idea of what our website is about: just a vagaBONDing mature couple figuring out how to travel more. A LOT more, that is. We achieve it by having location-independent careers and by doing a lot of fun research on what the world has to offer an “older” nomadic empty-nester couple on a budget. Our site is all about sharing what we’ve learned about extended travel, about being a prime-of-life couple, and about our world.

Please Be In Touch!

The most important thing we’ve learned about travel is that the best memories don’t come from the museums or the beaches or the monuments or the sights. The best memories come from the people you meet. With that in mind, please don’t hesitate to Say Hi! Who knows, maybe one day our paths will cross!

Chuck and Lori

We are Chuck & Lori, prime-of-life empty-nesters pursuing a lifestyle of location independence. Come along with us!

Since June, 2014, we've...

Traveled 160,000 miles,

...60,000 in 2017 alone.

Circumnavigated the globe.

Crossed the Atlantic 8 times,

...4 times by ship.

Visited 34 countries.

Visited 35 states and territories.

Visited all 41 of England's Anglican cathedrals.

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